San Francisco

The San Francisco scene

The first English-language book to teach Japanese rope bondage was written by a San Francisco educator, and the Bay Area today has several dedicated rope studios and community groups. The broader story, from early classes and books to ShibariCon and later conventions, is told in Kinbaku in North America. This page covers what is particular to the Bay Area.

Teachers and books

That educator is Midori, a San Francisco sex educator and artist whose The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage is described as the first English-language book to teach Japanese rope bondage. She leads Rope Dojo, a weekend intensive on rope, and her art has been shown at the city’s Asian Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and SOMArts. San Francisco was also a stage for Western-style rope teaching. In September 2018 the Two Knotty Boys, who have taught rope classes since 1999, held a workshop at Kink HQ on Mission Street built around the ties in their two best-selling books.

Shay Tiziano represents another strand. The San Francisco educator is known for dynamic Western bondage and self-suspension, wrote Tying & Flying, which their site calls the first book on self-suspension, and has taught at Stanford University and San Francisco State University among many other venues.

Rope on a public stage

Rope also has a place in the city’s large public kink events. The nonprofit Folsom Street Events runs the Folsom Street Fair, which the production collective Twisted Windows calls the largest kink event in the world. Since at least 2024 the fair has had a Bondage Stage. That year it ran from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. with four rope performances at the same time, produced by Ivy Limieux and Tiziano. In 2025, produced by Kinky POC Bay Area and Twisted Windows, it was advertised with more than fifty sets and over a hundred performers. Tiziano is also the fair’s stages and entertainment co-lead, and Twisted Windows stages rope performance showcases through the year.

Studios and curricula

Across the bay in Oakland is VoxBody Studio, whose name means “the voice of the body”. Founded in 2017, it shut its doors during the COVID pandemic, kept teaching online in the meantime, and since early 2022 has worked from a street-level, wheelchair-accessible studio, still in Oakland. Its in-house curriculum takes students from absolute beginner to suspension over one year, and it holds several rope jams a month.

State of Ropes, which holds its in-person classes at a kink shop in San Francisco, teaches a four-stage program, Bootstrap, Groundwork, Elevate and Arise, from basic ties and floor work to full suspension. It adds Continuum, a monthly advanced class, and SUSPND, a sister project that mixes shibari performance with DJ sets. San Francisco Shibari is run by the rope artist Fritz, who trains in Tokyo with Hajime Kinoko and is a certified Ichinawa instructor, so the Ichinawa-kai lineage is taught in the city too.

Community nights

Volunteer and peer-run groups fill the calendar between classes. The Bay Area Rope Club holds evening rope jams in Oakland, some paired with a skill share for rope bottoms. The venues advertise their classes in English. For a first visit, see What happens at a first shibari class.